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Sunday, April 17, 2011

A New Addition

I celebrated a pretty big birthday last month and, after several months of talking about it, I decided it was time to add another addition to our family.

Meet the newest member of the Knit/Wit household:

What, you were expecting a pet or another baby? No way -- at least not yet (I have to work on The Mister with regard to both). No, the latest addition is a fancy shmancy new piece of spinning equipment, a HansenCrafts miniSpinner. This is an electric spinner; I hesitate to call it a wheel, because it doesn't have one. Instead of using a drive wheel and treadles to power it, it has a motor that turns the flyer. A dial at the front controls the rate of speed and, thus, the ratios, meaning that how fast I spin is no longer dependent on the ratio of my whorls or how fast I can move my feet.

This e-spinner also has something my Lendrum doesn't -- a WooLee Winder.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this piece of equipment, it's basically a mechanism that automatically moves the yarn guide up and down the length of the bobbin, meaning the yarn winds on really evenly and, as a result, more fits on the bobbin. I didn't see a need to get one of these for my Lendrum, because it has a sliding yarn guide and I'm a certified Obsessive Hook Slider (i.e., I don't mind stopping while spinning to move the yarn guide a little at a time). However, the main advantage of an electric spinner like this is that you can keep the speed constant, which would make stopping to move the yarn guide kind of counterproductive.

Another big advantage of this e-spinner? The bobbin capacity -- just look at how it compares to one of my Lendrum bobbins:

I did a bit of practice on the new spinner with the fiber that was included with it, but I've got two full bobbins ready to be plied into laceweight!